(Love)
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures
all things.
1 Corinthians 13:7 (NKJV)
1 Corinthians 13:7 (NKJV)
This article
was written was written a few weeks ago for First Things by
Timothy George. It’s a
great look at how our arguably most famous president lived out his
Christian faith. Jeff
Though
Abraham Lincoln was neither baptized nor joined a church of any kind, he
was the most spiritually minded president in American history. His faith
was wrought on the anvil of anguish, both personal and national, and
because of this he has much to teach us in our own age of anxiety. Some
historians interpret Lincoln as a proto-secularist, not only because he
never professed Christian faith in a public way but also because he made
a number of skeptical comments about Christian teaching in his early
years. But it’s well to remember that even great people of faith,
including Mother Teresa, experience dark nights of the soul. John Calvin
once said that all true faith is tinged by doubt. When accused of being
a scoffer, Lincoln said that he had never denied the truth of the
Scriptures nor shown intentional disrespect for any Christian
denomination. In the midst of the Civil War, when Lincoln was told that
the Methodist church had sent more soldiers to the field, more nurses to
the hospitals, and more prayers to heaven than any other church, he
replied: “God bless the Methodist Episcopal church! Bless all the
churches! And blessed be God, who in this our trial giveth us the
churches.”
So
why did he never join a church himself? Two reasons. First, he was
offended by the religious rivalry and braggadocio of the frontier
preachers of his day. None of them made a compelling case to his
lawyerly mind that only one denomination was right and all the others
wrong. Further, Lincoln was reticent, “the most shut-mouthed man I
know,” as his law partner William Herndon said. He did not want to
cross the thin line between sincerity and self-righteousness. There was
nothing smug about Lincoln’s faith. Lincoln’s great achievement was
to see the terrible times through which he lived in the context of
God’s providential purposes. He referred to America as the
almost-chosen nation and came to see himself as a “chosen instrument
in the hands of the Almighty.” His firm belief that God is concerned
for history and reveals his will in it drew on the wisdom of the Hebrew
prophets, the teachings of the New Testament refracted through the
tradition of St. Augustine, and the Calvinistic Baptists among whom he
grew up.
Though
he read Voltaire as a young man, he had no interest in a deist God who
dumbly peers down on human struggles. The God of Lincoln meets us in
judgment and mercy and in the crucible of suffering that shapes the
destiny of us all. Lincoln also held in uneasy equipoise two other
cardinal teachings of the Christian tradition: the inherent dignity of
every person made in the image of God, and the corporate character of
original sin. His abhorrence of slavery was rooted in the former; his
disdain for utopian solutions to social problems grew out of the latter.
Thus he was hated by secessionists and abolitionists alike. The tragedy
of slavery and the Civil War would not be resolved, Lincoln thought, by
appealing to human goodness, but by calling the nation to repentance and
prayer. On nine separate occasions during the forty-nine months of his
presidency, Lincoln called his fellow citizens to humble themselves
before God in public penitence, prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving. At
the urging of the United States Senate, Lincoln issued a proclamation
appointing April 30, 1863 as a day of national repentance, fasting and
prayer. Between the smoke and blood of Antietam and Gettysburg, with the
outcome of the war still in doubt, Lincoln declared:
And,
insomuch as we know that, by God’s divine law, nations like
individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this
world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war,
which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon
us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national
reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the
choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years,
in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as
no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have
forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied
and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the
deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by
some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken
success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of
redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made
us!
After
the death of his beloved son Willie in 1862, the burdens of his office
became intolerable, and he sought solace in the faith of the Bible he
loved and knew so well. “I have been driven to my knees many times by
the realization that I had nowhere else to go,” he said. He and his
wife Mary rented a pew at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, a
short walk from the White House, and here Lincoln listened to the
sermons of the Princeton-trained pastor. During special prayer services
he would often sit in a side chamber lest he draw attention to himself
in the congregation. Here he placed himself and his nation in the hands
of God, seeking justice, imploring mercy, needing grace. On March 4,
1865, just six weeks before he was assassinated, Lincoln presented his
Second Inaugural, which has been called, “a prayer of confession for
the whole nation”—“more like a sermon than a state paper,”
according to Frederick Douglass.
At
that point the Civil War was practically won, but Lincoln refused to be
vindictive. He knew that the evil of slavery, rooted so deeply in the
South, had also been supported by business interests in the North. The
purposes of the living God could not be equated with the sectional
ambitions of either side but transcended them both. By refusing to
idolize the North or demonize the South, Lincoln called the entire
country to its true vocation as one nation under God. Quoting the
psalmist, Lincoln said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether” (Psalm 19:9 KJV). Two hundred years after
Lincoln was born in a rough-timbered cabin in Kentucky, America still
longs for “a new birth of freedom.” In times of economic collapse,
international uncertainty, of war, suffering, and terrorism, the faith
of Abraham Lincoln can help us as a people act with courage and hope.
Lincoln’s belief in the Bible, his reliance on prayer, his humility
and acknowledgement of God’s providential design in the tumult of
history, and his call for national repentance and thanksgiving beckon us
forward now as then. The words chiseled in stone in the Lincoln Memorial
are still a creed for us to live by:
With
malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as
God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we
are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have
borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which
may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace among ourselves, and
with all nations.
Timothy
George is founding dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University
and general editor of the Reformation
Commentary on Scripture.
For more:
follow on Twitter @jefflampl
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